Cross-posted from the Fund for Democratic Communities. Ed Whitfield spoke on the opening panel of the reRoute conference in Boston a few weeks ago. He used his “water holes and fishin’ poles” metaphor to discuss how the current economic system we operate within is fundamentally designed to prevent communities from developing their own wealth and […]

Cross posted from american.coop. Jessica Gordon Nembhard gives a Februrary, 2011, talk at Arizona State University on based on research for her upcoming book “Cooperative Courage: a History of African American Cooperative Thought and Practice.” [scribd id=160757478 key=key-16gsqw7m8reko4ecrxf6 mode=slideshow]

At last year’s CoopEcon gathering, Jessica Gordon Nembhard offered a keynote address on the history of cooperatives within marginalized African American communities. Below are some links to papers she’s written on this subject. From “African American Cooperatives”: African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership […]

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Cooperatives is an amazing resource for the coop movement in the United States. The chart below shows the impact that cooperatives have on the US economy. For more information, download the full report (pdf), Research on the Economic Impact of Cooperatives In 2006, the University of Wisconsin Center for […]

The following article was written by Wendell Paris for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives’ 25th Anniversary in 1992. Wendell was the first director of the Federation’s Rural Training and Research Center in the 1970’s. He will join us at CoopEcon 2013 on the opening keynote panel. I was a third generation Paris at Tuskegee Institute […]